


Colliding Orbits

by Immortalnite



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff and Angst, I've never written fluff before but this goddamn fandom, M/M, it just attracts fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 05:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19761544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immortalnite/pseuds/Immortalnite
Summary: Aziraphale takes Crowley to a planetarium after everything is over, since they never did go to Alpha Centauri.





	Colliding Orbits

Time had never passed so unbearably slowly for Aziraphale as it did today, and he had personally stopped time before. He failed to get through even a single chapter in any of the books he was currently reading, unable to sit still or stop looking at the clock long enough to focus on the words. The ticks of the second hand were louder than his body’s own heartbeat to him, tangible markers of time that echoed off every wooden surface in the shop, inaudible reverberations that his clothes and hair and skin absorbed. 

A few times, he considered pulling a little miracle and nudging the clocks forward just a few notches. Though, even if he was no longer an angel in the strictest sense of the word, moving time forward like that would surely mess up someone’s plans for the day and causing that kind of mischief just wasn’t his style, anyway. He’d feel too bad. So he, like nearly every other being on the planet, forced himself to wait through the turning of the clock.

When it finally hit 5 pm, he flipped the little sign on his door over to ‘Closed’, pulled down the curtains, and settled himself beside the window. Within a few minutes, the flood of people leaving their work and heading home got too thick for him to see through, and Aziraphale retreated to his flat above the bookshop. From his kitchen window, he could see both sides of the street, and the cars, but not anyone’s faces. He sighed. 

Every black car that swerved around the corner, every car that played music so loud he could hear it before he could see the car, every spot of curly red hair on the sidewalk below had his heart jumping into his throat. And yet, each time, it was never the right one.

Aziraphale became so engrossed in scanning the streets that, when the door chimed open downstairs, he didn’t register the significance of the noise. If he had been just a little less invested in his search, he would have remembered that he had locked his front door, and there was only one person besides himself who possessed the key to open it.

“Angel? You here?” A voice called from downstairs, startling him.

“Yes! Coming!” Azriaphale popped up from his seat and nearly flew downstairs. Near one of his front desks, a lanky man set down the book he’d been idly examining.

Though Crowley was no longer a demon in the strictest sense of the word, he still had the serpentine eyes and a slow, beckoning smirk that Aziraphale could only describe as sinful. He was currently using those eyes to peer over the tops of a dark pair of glasses at the former angel, and was currently giving that exact smirk.

Crowley held the door open for Aziraphale on the way out of the bookshop, and paused for him to lock up behind them before leading the way to where the Bentley was parked at a neat 32.7 degree angle to the sidewalk. Thankfully, the passenger side was the one facing the sidewalk, so Aziraphale didn’t have to try to dodge the cars that angrily swerved around the nose of the vehicle.

“What is the plan for tonight? You’ve been rather cagey about it all week. We’re not going to see some silly movie again, are we?” Crowley asked as he started the car.

“No, not at all. Take a right at the end of this street, and another right at the next light.” Aziraphale said, anxiously checking the cars around them in the wing mirror as Crowley merged into lanes with seemingly no regard for their current occupants.

After a few rounds of reminding himself mentally that Crowley had technically never gotten in a car accident (excluding that one time with Anathema and that other time in France), and was therefore, technically, a perfectly safe driver, Aziraphale managed to pry his eyes away from the road and his hand off the door. He turned his eyes, instead, to his companion.

There was something subtly different about Crowley’s appearance today, and Aziraphale couldn’t quite place it at first.

“Did you get new glasses?” Aziraphale finally asked, peering at the side of the accessory. He was ashamed to admit he’d never really paid much attention to Crowley’s glasses before. He understood the necessity of hiding Crowley’s eyes from the humans, but he’d always found their burnished gold colour quite lovely. So, he’d spent far more time trying to see through the tinted lenses than actually noticing the frames which contained said lenses. That being said, these glasses clearly lacked the obvious side-paneling of the previous model.

“Felt it was time for a change. The old ones got boring, y’know.” Crowley shrugged, but there was definitely something more that he wasn’t saying.

“Won’t these ones make it easier for humans to notice your eyes? There’s nothing to stop them from looking in the side.” Aziraphale pressed.

“Bah, humans don’t notice anything.” Crowley brushed it off, but his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “Besides, I enjoy having peripheral vision sometimes.”

There it was. The real reason he’d switched his glasses. Aziraphale knew Hastur had been more… persistent… in pursuing Crowley than Gabriel had been in pursuing him, but he hadn’t realised how much that had affected Crowley.

“I’m sorry, my dear.” Aziraphale said quietly. “Hell has stopped sending people after you, though, right?”

“Huh?” Crowley glanced over at him briefly, confusion crossing his face. “Oh. Yes, they’ve been quiet since the incident. I expect I’ll get at least century before they even begin to think about pestering me again. That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

The car was silent for a few minutes before Crowley continued.

“It was just, during the whole face-swap, everything went according to plan.” Crowley sighed, his voice weary. “We knew they’d come for us in the park, together, I knew they’d be there. But, I didn’t even notice Beelzebub until Heaven had already grabbed me. I knew you’d be fine, but seeing you get hit and fall, and nothing I could do about it? I- I didn’t enjoy it.”

When Aziraphale looked over at Crowley, his face was closed off and his gaze never wavered from the road. Aziraphale raised a hand, unsure of what he wanted to do with it, then dropped it back into his lap.

“I’m sorry, my dear.” He simply repeated, softer than before.

They drove the rest of the way in silence, and when they’d pulled into the parking lot of their destination, Aziraphale was so lost in thought that he didn’t even realise they’d arrived until Crowley got out and opened his door for him.

“So, would you like to explain what we are doing at a planetarium? From the looks of it, a planetarium that is closed for the night?” Crowley tilted his head. “We aren’t breaking in, are we? Isn’t that a bit naughty for you?”

“What? No, we aren’t breaking in, the front door is open. Besides,” Aziraphale huffed. “I’ve broken in to places before.”

He started walking towards the front door, a pout on his face.

“Angel, I don’t think it really counts as breaking in if the building in question is a church. Especially if there are already Nazis inside who ‘broke in’ first.” Crowley followed him, his longer stride keeping up easily. “C’mon, tell me. What are we doing here, what’s the surprise?”

Aziraphale just shook his head and smiled as they entered the building, the door open for them and all alarms turned off. It had taken more than one miracle to get tonight set up, but what were a few frivolous miracles now that no one was keeping track of him? He reached back to grab Crowley’s hand and pulled him towards the large double doors just beyond the entry room.

The door swung open to a curious room that was half-sunk into the floor. Steps descended to a lower level with coinciding circles of reclining chairs around a control panel. The ceiling overhead arched into a smooth dome, grey in the dark theatre. Crowley took his glasses off in the nearly pitch-black room and cast Aziraphale another look with his lovely eyes.

“It’s a planetarium!” Aziraphale finally burst out, unable to keep the surprise any longer.

Crowley gave him a blank look. “Okay, and?”

“Well, you kept trying to get me to go with you to Alpha Centauri, and we never went, and I’m not really even sure you actually wanted to go there, but just in case I thought we could do this. That thing in the middle will put pictures of different galaxies and nebulas and the like on the ceiling, up there, so it’ll be kind of like we’re exploring the universe together, just the two of us?” Aziraphale sighed. “It’s alright if you don’t want to, I just thought it’d be nice since we never got to go to Alpha Centauri, and this is like the next best thing to that, and it’s not that I wouldn’t have gone with you because I didn’t want to go with you, I did, I just knew I needed to stay here and try to help and I really hoped you’d stay too because I knew you could also help, and you did, and it did help! And I’m kind of just going on, aren’t I?”

“You really are.” Crowley nodded, but the look in his eyes could only be described as fond. “Where should we sit?”

Aziraphale beamed and pointed to a couple of chairs. “The middle has the best view. You sit down, I’ll go start the video.”

Crowley went to their seats while Aziraphale marched up to the control panel and pushed the buttons indicated by the sticky notes. The ceiling went dark and a little white loading circle appeared as Aziraphale went to take his seat next to Crowley.

Crowley was already fully reclined in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, the long lines of his body stretched out in the chair like a snake in the sun, sleek and satisfied. Aziraphale sank into the chair next to him, his hands folded in his lap as the chair reclined and the video started.

A man’s voice came on over the speakers, deep and resonant even with the volume turned rather low. He started to introduce himself as the narrator and made some opening remarks about the universe’s age, but Aziraphale quickly tuned him out when lights began to bloom across the artificial sky. At first, only a few stars were visible after the creation of the universe, but more quickly began to shine as God made them and placed them into space. The point of view shifted, and then an image of Earth filled the screen. Beside him, Crowley moved his arms out from behind his head.

An image of the night sky as it appeared from the Parthenon during its construction appeared, which, if Aziraphale’s memory of that time served, was quite accurate. The image blurred and shifted as the video sped through time, showing the slow crawl of the stars towards new alignments throughout ages. It showed the stars as they would have appeared at the time of Jesus’s birth, although it did not show the theatrical production which several of Aziraphale’s fellow angels had attempted in the sky that night. It finally stopped on an image of the night sky today, complete with the new constellation that Adam had recently added in. Crowley’s upper arm brushed along his.

The program showed specific stars in the night sky, Betelgeuse and Sirius and Bellatrix, then moved out to show the Pleiades and other, more distant groups. Watching the program move through space was dizzying, in a way, but also exhilarating. Aziraphale hadn’t flown in quite a long time, but if memory served, this was a similar feeling. The screen moved out to view the whole of the galaxy, and the blur of motion jolted him.

He meant to grab the armrest of his chair, but instead his hand landed on something soft, smooth, and slightly warm, that felt suspiciously like Crowley’s hand. Looking over, he found Crowley watching him with an inscrutable expression. His throat suddenly felt very dry.

“Er, sorry.” Aziraphale went to move his hand, but Crowley’s fingers tightened on his, just barely. It was a slight enough movement that Aziraphale wasn’t sure Crowley had even consciously done it. His eyes flicked quickly to the screen and back. “You’re not watching the program?”

Crowley’s lips twitched up. “Angel, I was there in the beginning. I helped create a lot of this stuff.”

Aziraphale felt his cheeks heat, his silly body reacting. “Oh. Right.”

“There are better things to look at, anyway.” Crowley’s voice was quiet, but his eyes were full of something that burned like hellfire.

The lighting in the room flickered, signifying a change on the screen, but Aziraphale couldn’t look away. For a moment, he understood what it must be like to be a rabbit trapped in the gaze of a snake. Though, unlike the rabbit, Aziraphale couldn’t look away simply because he could not imagine a more wonderful view. He sat in a room full of stars and nebulea that burned with the light of Creation, and knew that the most beautiful thing in all of it was right in front of him, holding his hand.

“I love you.”

The words were out of Aziraphale’s mouth before he had really even thought it through, and Crowley’s reaction was instantaneous. His face seemed to close, expression going inscrutable, and his hand went limp under Aziraphale’s.

He broke eye contact and let out a little noise that sounded like a scoff. “Of course you do, you’re an angel. You love everyone.”

Aziraphale turned his whole body in his seat to face Crowley, forgetting entirely about the film. He reached forward and clasped Crowley’s hand in between both of his.

“No, my dear boy, I love you. I am _in_ love with you. I do not love _everyone_ , and I am most certainly not _in_ love with everyone.” As he said the words, he was surprised at the rush of feeling that accompanied them. He’d never thought those words to himself, never even lightly pondered anything like them. And yet, the moment they left his mouth, he knew they were absolutely true.

Crowley’s face remained unchanged, a smooth expression that seemed fiercely determined to not show emotion. Aziraphale hated Hell for what it had done to Crowley.

“Just, stop me if you want, alright?” Aziraphale said, then leaned forward to press his lips to Crowley’s.

It was barely a kiss, nothing more that a quick brush of skin. But when Aziraphale opened his eyes, Crowley had shut his tightly, face tight. He looked almost pained.

“Do _not_ do that unlessss you mean it.” Crowley’s voice came out in a harsh, hissed whisper.

Aziraphale barely needed a second to think. He’d had six millenia to do that, after all. “I mean every bit of it.”

There was a quiet, fluttering sigh, and Crowley pounced. He moved with the speed of a striking snake, but his hands were careful where they framed Aziraphale’s face, like he was holding the most precious thing in existence and couldn’t bear to break it. His mouth was so gentle, so reverent, and it took Aziraphale a long moment to realise the wetness he felt on his cheeks was Crowley crying.

When they separated, Crowley immediately turned his head away, trying to hide it, but Aziraphale caught his cheek. He pulled an handkerchief out of his pocket, wiping at the tears.

Crowley let out a little hiccuping laugh. “Only you would still carry one of those around, angel.”

“Perhaps.” Aziraphale answered, smiling a little. “Perhaps.”

“Aziraphale, I-” Crowley started, then choked off.

“I know, my dearest.”

Crowley kissed him again. This time, there wasn’t any of the hesitation. It was as slow as the last one, but deeper, and with that flicker of heat that had been in Crowley’s gaze earlier. It wasn’t desperation and desire as much as it was yearning and belonging. Crowley kissed him like the world was ending again, like he couldn’t bear to not kiss him, like Aziraphale held the answer to everything he wanted.

They were both shaking when they parted.

“Should we go home?” Aziraphale whispered.  
Crowley said nothing, simply stood and offered his hand to help him up. Aziraphale didn’t let go once he was on his feet, and they walked out hand in hand, the film still playing in the small theatre.

~*~

And so the angel and the demon returned to the bookshop, because the bookshop was where the angel called home, and that was more than enough for the demon.


End file.
